Rabbi Lauren asked me to speak today about how I joined Kol Tzedek. My journey
to be here today has been round-about—a bit strange—and quite unexpected, to
me at least—in other words, the typical Kol Tzedek story.
I grew up in an interfaith household, on the “wrong side” of course. My mother
was Christian and my father was Jewish. We attended Jewish services pretty
regularly when I was young, and then moved in with my grandparents when I was
5 and started going to church. My impression at the time was that the services
were equally boring, but the Jews had better bread.
Each summer, I went to a week of church camp and a week of Jewish day camp,
where I learned a lot of Hebrew kids songs, and how to bake bread in a cardboard
box coated with aluminum foil. We did a little bit of Christmas, a little bit of
Passover, the occasional Hannukah, and chocolate egg hunts for Easter. Although
my grandfather was a minister and a professor of religion, I mostly thought of us
going to church as a way to connect with our local and global community; as a
teen I decided that I’d rather just start at the community and service part and skip
the religious stuff altogether.
But since I went to school in New York, Judaism kept finding me. With one of my
good friends, I spent many Shabbat afternoons in a Jewish communal house,
singing, learning, eating, and taking in what it meant to spend a sacred day apart.
With another friend, I attended Shabbat services and havdallahs across the city,
and discovered both the inherent sexism that put me off, and joyous vibrancy that
made me wish I could have actually been born a “real” Jew.
So, when I met my partner, Tyler, who was also raised in an interfaith family,
neither of us really identified as Jews. We went to High Holidays services with
friends, and hosted the occasional seder, but we certainly weren’t looking for a
synagogue to join when we moved to Philadelphia last year. We figured that we
might send the future offspring to Torah school one day, but we weren’t in a
hurry.
So if this story is starting to sound familiar, you’re in the right place.
When the high holidays rolled around last year, we attended Kol Tzedek on a
whim, and we were immediately hooked. There were families with kids. There
were queers. There were interfaith families and quite a few folks who had
recently converted. There were members who were fluent in Hebrew, and some
who knew even less than we do—which isn’t a lot! There were people of all
backgrounds and experiences, with whom we had nothing more in common than
that we all felt like Kol Tzedek was the right place to be. There were musical
services and social justice services and kids services. I mean, all three?!? Someone
must have designed Kol Tzedek for us!
I also cannot tell you how welcomed we felt, both in the overheated crush of
people on Yom Kippur, and in the smaller, more intimate services thereafter. (I
think we missed all of the other holidays last year for childbirth classes.) People
who had been strangers quickly became acquaintances, and then friends. We
came, within a matter of weeks, to think of ourselves as being part of a
community. Over social justice topics and vegetarian potlucks (reading my mind
again, KT!) we met dozens of people who each brought their own stories into this
rich tapestry of diversity and unity. When we moved from New York to Philly we
felt like we had found the right city, but when we joined Kol Tzedek we felt like
we were home. Our new baby was blessed and welcomed here, and I cannot
think of a better place for him to find direction, friendships, role models, and
guidance in leading a meaningful life.
Until I came to Kol Tzedek, I did not have much of a spiritual life, but I am coming
to find that connection in more and more places, especially through social justice,
service, and community. Rabbi Heschel said, “If [a person] were able to survey at
a glance all he has done in the course of his life, what would he feel? He would be
terrified at the extent of his own power."
The god that I believe in doesn’t want me to do good works, that god is the good
works. That god is the witnessing, the welcoming, the reaching out, and the acting
up. Kol Tzedek makes that wrestling with the good and evil of the world, like
Jonah outside the city of Ninevah, part of what it means to worship. Kol Tzedek,
meaning, “the voice of justice,” is a place where we can both work to heal the
world through campaigns and community, but also hold in our hearts the great
injustices of the world about which we feel powerless. On this day of atonement,
being part of this community means not just atoning for petty mistakes, slights,
and omissions, but setting ourselves in a wider context. We have great faith that
God will absolve us. But we must also make the commitment to use that power
that we have for healing and justice.
On the more personal level, this has been an extremely stressful year for me. We
moved to a new city, had a baby, and started a home-based preschool which we
are still working to grow. In the midst of this, I quit my full-time job, our primary
source of income, and started a PhD. I often stay awake at night wrestling with
my choices; are we doing the right things for our students? Are we doing the right
things for our family? Will we have enough money? Will we have enough time?
Friends, family members, and even my doctor have told me that I need to start
taking better care of myself, suggesting yoga or meditation, but even joining the
gym to go swimming a few times a week has felt impossible.
With the turning of the year, and this sacred time apart to reflect on those
choices without the recriminations or the judgment, Tyler and I decided that the
best way for us to spend time together, to take care of ourselves, and to remove
ourselves from the stresses of the week is through Shabbat. Where once I held a
rather all-or-nothing idea about being shomer Shabbos, within this spiritual
community we’ve felt empowered to make it meaningful for us. We will still go to
the farmer’s market and buy produce for the week, celebrating our nourishment
from the earth and our connections with local, small farms. We will still use
technology for Skype calls with distant relatives and to invite friends over for
dinner, but I will abstain from checking work emails or reading for classes. We
realized that baking challah before Shabbos was too stressful, so we will spend
our Saturday afternoons chatting in the kitchen, accompanied by the
sensuousness of kneading dough and the aroma of bread baking in the oven, to
have piping hot challah for an early Shabbat dinner before havdallah. We plan to
teach our son the Shabbat prayers so that they become a mystical part of our
special family time. We will make a sacred space within the week to reconnect to
God, ourselves, each other, and our community in a way that makes sense for us
as modern, reconstructionist Jews.
So in conclusion, I just want to say thank you. To Rabbi Lauren, to our many, many
friends, to the founders of this community 10 years ago who have made this
special place, and to those of you who I haven’t met, but hope to get to know
throughout the years ahead of us together. Thank you all for creating this space
together.